Chanting in Chinese
This week I've been reading The Missionary's Curse and other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village by Henrietta Harrison. I learned about this book when I started to see tweeted links to Ian Denis Johnson's New York Review of Books piece which I did not completely read because of the paywall, but I was intrigued enough by what I did read there to want this book.
Ever since I first started attending Chinese masses in Shenzhen in 2006, I have been fascinated by these chants I would hear after Mass. I have acted as a most receptive audience to these, and in the past few years I decided I wanted to participate myself. I spent some time poking around various Chinese Catholic websites, searching for the specific chants that our current parish uses. These do vary by region and tradition. It was beneficial for me to find them on the internet, too instead of a prayer book, so that I could copy and paste the text into translating applications so I could also have the pinyin.
I stumble and struggle to keep up with everyone else in the pews who have decades of recitation on me. Likely I will never have them committed to memory, or even read them fully without the help of my pinyin cheat sheet. I do feel some sort of physical and emotional longing for the experience of these chants when I am not at a Chinese Mass. When I am at a Mass in any other language (even in China), I tend toward more private devotions and silent thanksgiving. I couldn't chant these same prayers alone; that would feel strange and lonely.
I haven't finished The Missionary's Curse yet, so I will have more to say (mostly positive, so far) about the book when I am done. I have come across an occasional passage, though, that has really spoken to my own experiences in the Catholic Churches in China. It is as though I have been given a few more pieces to fit into this giant puzzle, the size and shape of which I still don't know but I can sometimes begin to make out of what the puzzle is. For instance, there are a few times when she discusses a particular Chinese style of praying that has become a very important part of our lives.
On page 28, Harrison writes
Whatever the style, chanting meant that prayers were not a matter for private communion with God, but a public group activity. Daily chanted prayers brought families and villages together and gave their members a physical and emotional experience of community.Harrison at this point is specifically writing about the situation in this particular Shanxi village she refers to only as Cave Gully, a place with a strong Catholic identity since the eighteenth century. In the absence of resident or missionary priests to celebrate the sacraments, the Catholics could still come together to chant their prayers together. These chants would over the years be suppressed by either the government or even missionaries only to be revived later, until the tradition would be reappear so strongly after the churches were re-established in the early 1980s.
Ever since I first started attending Chinese masses in Shenzhen in 2006, I have been fascinated by these chants I would hear after Mass. I have acted as a most receptive audience to these, and in the past few years I decided I wanted to participate myself. I spent some time poking around various Chinese Catholic websites, searching for the specific chants that our current parish uses. These do vary by region and tradition. It was beneficial for me to find them on the internet, too instead of a prayer book, so that I could copy and paste the text into translating applications so I could also have the pinyin.
I stumble and struggle to keep up with everyone else in the pews who have decades of recitation on me. Likely I will never have them committed to memory, or even read them fully without the help of my pinyin cheat sheet. I do feel some sort of physical and emotional longing for the experience of these chants when I am not at a Chinese Mass. When I am at a Mass in any other language (even in China), I tend toward more private devotions and silent thanksgiving. I couldn't chant these same prayers alone; that would feel strange and lonely.
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